Neto Blog

Security, performance and scalability: Why we’ve moved to Cloudflare

The world wide web is a battlefield. Website visitors are impatient, cyber security threats are on the rise, attackers are stronger and more sophisticated than ever, and because we are giving away more and more personal information, concerns about privacy are sky-high. All of this, under ever-increasing scrutiny by media and government.

To ensure Neto merchants continue to deliver world-class, secure and reliable ecommerce websites at speed, we are now offering Cloudflare, the industry-leading content delivery and security network, to all of our customers, free of charge.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is an intelligent network that sits in front of Neto merchants' ecommerce stores, acting as a reverse proxy for websites and serving as a gateway between users and the ecommerce platform. Cloudflare handles all policy management and traffic routing, and is infinitely scalable.

Sound like we are speaking another language? For the less-technically inclined out there, basically what this move means is:

Increased security

Increase reliability

As Neto goes global, our merchants can too.

1. Speed and Performance

Cloudflare is designed to speed up and streamline connections from visitors to their online destinations. Cloudflare has a global content delivery network powered by hundreds of data centres around the world, and will route traffic through the centre closest to your visitor’s location. If a centre is too busy, Cloudflare will automatically redirect traffic to the next closest centre, so if your website visitor is drinking wine and eating croissants (and doing some online shopping) in Paris, and the Français centre is experiencing heavy traffic, Cloudflare could route the query through the Brussels centre instead.

Cloudflare's global footprint includes 118 Data Centers across the world

Once the request has been routed to the nearest data centre, a visitor’s browser will request the static website content. Cloudflare stores - or ‘caches’ - both static and dynamic content from your website like images, CSS and javascript on their servers, allowing them to serve it up much quicker when a query is made. But before they serve up this content, they will assess if the visitor is a threat based on a range of variables including their IP address.

These are just a couple of the ways Cloudflare helps deliver content efficiently to your visitors whilst protecting your safety and theirs. More on safety and security up next.

2. Security

Second, but of no less importance, is security. Cloudflare Security Services protects and secures websites, applications and APIs against threats, attacks and abusive bots, without sacrificing performance.

Mitigate DDoS Attacks

Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) are where multiple computers systems attack a site by flooding it with traffic including messages, connection requests or malformed packets so that it crashes or responds slowly - literally ‘denying’ its service to users.

Attacks like these can wreak havoc for a retailers; leading to lost customers, decreased trust and damaged reputations. Cloudflare mitigates against malicious attacks like these with its distributed, redundant network that can absorb the flood of traffic, along with a range of additional security protections that block dangerous traffic before it reaches a site.

Prevent customer data breach

Australia is one of the world’s biggest targets for cyber attacks, with one in every two businesses being hit each year, according to leading IT and networking provider, Cisco. Individuals are also under attack, losing $711,951 to identity theft last year.

3. Scalability

Already in parts of Asia and New Zealand, Neto is set to continue to expand globally, and many of our merchants have their sights set on foreign shores too. And Cloudflare will support this expansion for all, says Ryan Murtagh, CEO and founder.

“While most of our customers have started out selling nationally or to a smaller geographic footprint, today we’re seeing many of these inspiring retail entrepreneurs expand internationally and transform into truly global businesses”.

Neto retailer, Bicycles Online, have already achieved success on the international stage by selling on Amazon US, and are now expanding into Asia. They will benefit greatly from Cloudflare’s ‘always-on’ online service.

“Cloudflare will essentially ‘super-charge’ the internet for Bicycles Online, delivering an optimised experience for its customers - and potential customers - wherever in the world they may be.

Cloudflare makes the internet work the way it should for anything online. It will help load site content at speed, keeping customers on your site no matter where they are in the world. It will protect your customers at the checkout, and will shield you from threats.

Coupled with our recent migration to leading cloud computing provider, AWS, moving to Cloudflare is just another step in our ongoing efforts to build a platform that will support our customers’ global growth trajectories. We always intend to stay one step ahead in terms of functionality and integration required in a complete solution for ecommerce, POS, inventory and fulfilment. All Neto customers get access to Cloudflare free.

Neto is the only Australian retail management platform that provides a complete solution for ecommerce, point of sale, inventory, and fulfilment. Our integrated back-end technology enables exceptional and consistent customer experiences via any channel, be it in-store, online or through a marketplace. We automate repetitive tasks and integrate with multiple sales channels to manage orders and shipments.